Author: Zach Miller

Hi, my name is Zach. I want to welcome you to my marketing laboratory. Yeah I know, it kinda looks like a blog, but there’s a reason for that.

So you’ve heard a little bit about me (hopefully all good), and you want to learn why I’m ‘the guy to follow’. And I don’t blame ya, I don’t follow a man till I know where he’s headin’ too.

So, who am I to tell you all these marketing marvels & secrets? Well, let me tell you I’m no genius – I’m actually a college drop out! But even with sub-par collegiate skills, I’ve made myself and others millions online.

Zach: Hey everybody Zach Miller here again and today I have an amazing expert with us, if you’ve been kind of hanging on by the thread you understand that have been going through all of the biggest experts that I can find online because as you know I’m the expert sales funnels and you guys have been asking for social media. So, when it comes to social media I have a real expert with us today he has skills in teaching Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and much more.

In fact how skilled is he? He’s taught over a hundred and thirty courses just on social media alone and he has more than four years of experience and if that wasn’t enough, how many people are listening to this guy? Eighty five thousand plus people, if that doesn’t turn your head I don’t know what will so, with that being said guys I’d love to introduce Diego Davila how are you doing Diego?

Diego: Hey Zach! I am doing great thank you very much for inviting me here to this interview to your broadcast, thank you to everyone that is listening to us right now and yes I will I am here to help you in all in any way that I can to grow your social media presence that’s my goal my goal is basically to help and Trepan or small business owners, people that have an online store maybe people that have a local business to grow their online presence and capture more clients and increase the sales and we can we are leaving here right now in a very excited time because today we have all the tools and more most of the tools are one hundred percent free for everybody to grow and to to reach people basically all over the world.

Zach: Amazing, So again for that portion of the audience that really doesn’t know what you do they’re not too familiar with social media because I know some people are just you know green thumbs as we consider and why don’t you explain a little bit about what you do what you teach and how that results in a business for people?

Diego: Excellent yes I am an online instructor and I am social media expert helping people as I tell you to grow their presence right now I puff {courses} on you to me so I am targeting people and you to me on a Skillshare on YouTube, Facebook and I will talk about all these tools and yes I teach specifically Facebook marketing how you can use all the power of Facebook pages, all the power of YouTube that is there, all the social media Slate be translating to grow your online presence. So, I have courses on you to me mainly when I share my knowledge there, I share of strategies most of my courses are very practical so we are not just talking about theoretical things that you need to learn we are giving we are basically taking the right steps to get the results. The work here on the course that we are having here is to help you that are listening here to get some results get some strategies to grow your business that’s the most important thing.

Zach: Exactly so when it comes to kind of getting started in social media I think there’s always a few you know bumps that everyone faces but what are the misconceptions within your industry they’re just plain incorrect?

Diego: Well most people that start let’s say with Facebook marketing they start placing an ad they have a Facebook page everything is optimized is great and they said okay it’s time to invest on Facebook ads to reach more people, increase my sales and they create the first ad and they drive people straight to the sale and you are {inaudible} on the funnel so I always recommend instead that’s a big misconception, people say OK Facebook ads never work I try several times I lose money and I have no results the problem Guys is that you cannot I mean in order to invite them and convince your client to buy your products your services you need to establish a relationship with your client and the best way to do that is through funnel and so that’s why I recommend always to drive people from your Facebook ad to your funnel and after they go through the funnel know you will ask for the sale and that’s the way that I am working with my client with my students and what’s amazingly we are having great results and yes again the misconception these people that don’t have much experience and create their ad just driving to the sale saying believing that ads don’t work right now.

Zach: Right and I think we even discussed this and previous episode where the difference between cold and warm traffic and when you get someone who does not know anything about you or your product they’re cold traffic and you have to first in order to convert cold traffic into warm is get that connection that relationship usually through email or a social media connection.

Diego: Exactly

Zach: So with that being said, tell me how did you get started in your industry kind of talk me through that?

Well, I was actually was working as an enabler engineer that’s my my profession I did the university and all that I was on a regular job but I was always passionate about marketing about all the tools and especially now that we have all the social media the Internet and all the amazing tools that we have at our disposal, so I started studying that, reading about that, creating, helping people to grow their businesses using social media even when I was a made regular job working as enabler admin so it was a journey of more than forty years that took me to get here so when I saw that people were listening to me and asking for advice I decided to create my {inaudible} course and from there everything started growing people start discovering the course organically on {youtome} on Google and now here we are yeah.

Zach: So kind of just a quick note for people is that don’t think that there’s really overnight millionaires there’re overnight successes but definitely not big big successes that people dream of it takes work and time.

Diego: Exactly

Zach: With that being said what you would say the number one reason for people failing is especially in some {inaudible} industry.Diego: Especially on social media site I think that the main thing is that we need to be consistent because if you have your Facebook page you have your YouTube channel if you are not creating content every single day, every single week you are not consistent and people want to listen to you, people want consistency they want to receive value from you in a regular basis it doesn’t need to be every day you can do it once a week for example you can do it every two weeks but you need to commit to some schedule and be consistent with that in the beginning guys you want to see a great result that’s how it works I mean you are starting with your social media and you are putting energy there and you want to see people watching your videos people liking your Facebook page your Facebook posts but you, in the beginning you will see just a few of that but if you keep doing that if you keep the work if you keep delivering value you will see that’s almost one of these science if you are consistent at the end you will see the result.

Zach: So maybe what are some tools that could get you know our listeners involved in social media and put them with their best foot forward.

Diego: Well, the people are starting my suggestion is first number one create your Facebook page it’s very easy, go to Facebook click on the menu and click on Create page is a step by step process that you can do it at like in ten minutes after you listen to this you can do that and have your Facebook page ready in ten minutes. Second, you need to create a YouTube channel because YouTube is a {grail} way to find new clients new people to reach people for free because is the second biggest search engine in the world people go there to search for solution, search for how to videos so if you have you need to think about the pain points of your audience and start creating when you have your your Facebook page your YouTube channel start creating content, fixing not fixing but actually adding value and helping your client new target owners to solve the pain point and they’re happy and with that being regularly you being consistent on the creator of the creation of videos and Facebook post I mean if you are doing all these tips and doing consistently I think you will have a great success.

Zach: Awesome and also for those of you listening again Diego has a Facebook master class and at the end I’m kind of going to give a link to that, so that you guys can just kind of see Facebook, YouTube all the social media he walks through and he helps you gives you additional tips because let’s face it guys I only want you guys to be able to listen to this while you’re driving to work or while you have the free time but when you have those couple hours to sit down and really make a strategy Diego help you take you through step by step in what to do for each social media platform and one thing I will say, Diego wouldn’t you agree with me in that not every social media platforms necessary.

Diego: Correct yeah that’s a great point in fact thank you for bringing that because now we have a lot of tools a lot of social media and people get overwhelm in the beginning because I mean they see they think they need to start creating their Instagram presence, their Facebook presence, the YouTube and they get I mean we get all crazy with the amount of content the amount of things so we need to produce for you out there and you need to be consistent so that’s I mean that’s a full time job by itself. So my suggestion I thank you very much for bringing this up is to concentrate in the beginning in two channels two social media channels Facebook and YouTube all the other ones are also are fantastic and {inaudible} also there. But if you concentrate your energy your time in Facebook and Youtube initially you will have the best results and after that when you see that your audience growing on YouTube on Facebook you are getting the likes you can start and you see OK I have time maybe to start on Instagram so let’s do that I will be posting like every two days for example OK you can start doing that and start growing {Inaudible} after that and also doing the other ones that you have started already.

Zach: So I kind of have a question when it comes to getting started on a network or social media how important is email marketing as well and how does that tie into social media?

Diego: Email marketing is super important because in my opinion it’s the most important asset on your business right now because you have their name and their email so and so social media is one of the best tools I know to build that e-mail is to create that to put people on your funnel on your email sequence you know and asking for the sale at the end so in everything in every post in every YouTube video, in every Facebook post is recommended to add a link to your website or to your funnel I mean it’s not good to ask for this for the for the email all the time in every post but I mean in YouTube you can add on the comments is very you are not asking hard you know it’s soft you’re asking like in a good way on the description of the video you can add that at the end you can add YouTube cards which is great a great tool that YouTube just Implemented on the system right now and it’s free you can go to your video settings and click on carts and video and you can add that {Inaudible} driving then straight to your funnels or straight to your {Upton page} OK So of course its super important to start collecting your customer’s name and email because if you have everybody on Facebook everybody on youtube you can still contact them but do we have the social media algorithm guys I mean if you create a Facebook post and you have let’s say ten thousand people on your page not everybody will see your post OK if you’re sending an e-mail everybody I mean everybody will receive your e-mail and it’s up to them if they will copy if they will click or not so with the email have a direct contact with your {inaudible} and that’s that’s outstanding.

Zach: I just want to aim that point guys if you didn’t quite understand why I always get on you guys’ backs about every single thing you do online every piece of content should drive back to a squeeze page where you getting their email and if you’re not why did you even do that work in the first place am I right?

Diego: Exactly yes

Zach: So that’s kind of the big issue that I see nowadays is people are thinking that I got to be nice I got to be that cool guy who doesn’t ask for any information for months and months and months but the thing is that not everyone’s going to say yes but the people who are already interested from day one why not let them get involved with you? So one last thing that I just want to really ask you tell me something that is true in your industry that almost nobody agrees with you on.

Diego: Can you repeat that please?Zach: Tell me something that’s true inside your industry that you know but no one else agrees with you and you are kind of like the lone guru.

I mean it is difficult for, it’s difficult to pick that for the social media marketing side because I mean everybody, every company today is paying attention to digital marketing and we have social media marketing and we have the Internet, which is the source of all this knowledge that we have. So basically I mean I believe that the right way to do it is to have the complete package, the funnel, not just the ads that’s super important I am talking about this all the time and I’m repeating myself because I have clients that I tell them, I help them to build the system and they still keep making the same mistake and people are losing money so Facebook ads YouTube ads works guys we need to do it the right way we need to have a system and if you have the system it you will have results is a science you know that’s why big companies you see be companies investing in Facebook ads on You Tube We see all the time you know and these big companies have like a huge marketing departments with super smart people that say yes let’s put all these millions on ads so its working for them if it’s working for them it can work for you too you know if you have the right system.

Zach: Right so, is there any roadblocks that people will have when they first get started in social media?Diego: Yes you need to have especially let’s talk about Facebook and YouTube which is my suggestion for you so you can implement right now after these podcast guys go there and create your Facebook page and if you already have it you need to optimize it so the big roadblock for Facebook is that people are not consistent number one and number two is that the page is not optimized so when you’re when you leave go to your Facebook page they don’t feel like liking your page you know they said OK They looked at it and they leave you know and we don’t want that we want that everybody to come to your Facebook page and to your YouTube channel they say OK I want to subscribe to this I want to like this Facebook page so from now from then they will start receiving your notifications and notifications from the social media and all that so, the problem is the big block roads that I see Zach is that people go and create these assets the YouTube channel and Facebook page and they don’t optimize it in the best way possible I mean they {inaudible} they can use a common video with a message for your audience a message talking to pain point that they have so in they when they see that the way when they watched the video they said yes I want to subscribe to this channel you know.

Zach: Awesome so, for those of you who see right now on your screen there is going to be the Web site that you can visit Diego Davila dot com and all of Diego’s courses are located in press portion of his website and if you see you can follow that short link that L.-Y. link to get Diego’s social media master course so that’s been updated for this year, it includes a little bit of every social media a lot of tips and tricks we couldn’t cover Inside the time here like I said guys we want to keep it short for you so that we have compact actionable and you can move forward on it. With that being said Diego is there any final closing words you like to add to the audience to get them moving and get their kind of that fire under their ass?

Diego: Yes I know I want to invite you guys that after you finish listen to listening to these go to your computer if you’re driving when you arrive at the work or arrive at home go to your computer download what Zach is recommended to you and open Facebook and create that Facebook page optimize it following their steps that I’m sharing with you on that material on that course because that will take you to the next level that’s the first step and if you don’t have a Facebook presence or YouTube presence today I mean its difficulty are always difficult so not these two tools will help you to to take advantage of all the power of social media and get more clients increase your sales on all the good stuff that we have today you know.

Zach: Awesome Well I want to thank you so much for being with us Diego I know this is going to help everybody listening so much when it comes to their social media’s and that next step to take Thank you very much like awesome I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day thank you.

Zach: Hi guys! Zach Miller here again today and as you know I’ve been going through interviewing basically the most successful people online, people of expertise that are outside my expertise which as you guys know, am a great guy sales funnels probably you know one of the best but when it comes to anything else I’m honest, I suck. So, I’m here to bring to you the absolute best cutting edge, when it comes to Kindle book marketing especially on Amazon you guys know how powerful that is especially for your free plus shipping offers any books any authors out there listening, you understand that Amazon is the go to to become successful online and with me today I have the owner, the founder and the creator of Kindleprenuer KDP rocket, it is the largest bookmarking website online right now, he is a consultant to NY Times bestselling authors in both the fiction and non-fiction genre so if you can wrap your head around that this guy has a lot under his belt. Not only that, he’s worked personally with Pat Flynn. So, all right without much further ado you guys I’m going to show him to you’ll here we have him Dave Chesson. How you doing Dave?

Dave: Hey guys! How’s it going?

Zach: So before we really get too deep into it for those of the people that don’t really know maybe they don’t quite understand what Kindle is, what do you do and want you to explain a little bit about that for the audience.

Dave: Well sure, you know back in two thousand and seven Amazon did something that was a major game changer to publishing. Before this, OK before two thousand and seven we had to be phenomenal writers and somehow convince an agent to represent us and then that agent had to convince some publisher to pick it, up then after that you would have to sign contracts and then maybe your book would actually show up but if you couldn’t do those things you could never publish like that’s it you’re done your dream of writing a book and have a fall into the hands of people was over. Well in two thousand and seven Amazon said whoa let’s just let’s just cut out that middleman here and let’s allow people to sell publish their books write on the world’s largest book market Amazon dot com (amazon.com) and they created this thing called “Kindle Direct publishing” (KDP) where now anybody can take a book format it and put it right up on Amazon and get it in front of hungry shoppers so right there it allows normal people like you and me to be able to sit down and write the book that’s on our heart and actually get it out there.

Zach: Wow that’s amazing so just the ability to go from someone who has a great idea to now I can actually make money off that I can be the author I’ve always been dreaming about I know a lot of our audience that are listening even now I’ve probably been sitting in there waiting for years just thinking I’ve got this great idea I want to write it down how the heck am I going to make any money off of it and this is exactly how right?

Dave: Exactly and to tell you the truth there are three different reasons why anybody out there should consider publishing a book on Amazon. Number one is like you said somebody has a dream we we all had that moment in our lives when we were like Man I I got the site you know idea in my head I just want to get it out there or you know I have a story a personal story that I know people would heal by just hearing it and that’s one, the second one is that you know you’ve got millions of shoppers on Amazon looking for their next fix when it comes to reading they’re willing to pay for it and so that’s another way to monetize your ideas if you have this great blog or you have content that people love you can turn that into a book reach a whole new market and make more money, and the third one which this is the big favorite and maybe you weren’t number one in two but I’ll bet you got number three here and that’s to become a best seller. So maybe you have a business, maybe you’re a lawyer maybe you’re you know a side hustling dad or something like that but the fact of the matter is is that to be able to state on your resume, on your application or just on your business card ‘bestselling author’ that’s huge and thanks to Amazon it’s a lot easier than you think.

Just to give you kind of a quick story to show how much this can do for you, I was working with a lawyer up in Seattle once and we came together we put together kind of like the quintessential book on DUI. So you know, say for example somebody gets a DUI the first thing they think is ‘oh my god what do I do’ you know like it seems like this crazy circus now and then my life sucks, so he put together this book we were able to quickly get it to a best seller and it’s category and now out of all the other lawyers that deal with DUIs in Seattle or in that state from that matter, he’s the only one that’s able to say well yeah but I’m also a bestselling author on DUIs, right? Everybody else is saying why I went to Cornell I would assume such and such and he’s like yeah I went there too but here’s here’s my calling card aka my book you can have that for free, how many customers do you think he is converting over the other guys that don’t have that. So again there’s just such an opportunity right there to really set yourself apart and it’s not that hard thanks to the Amazon platform.

Zach: Awesome so now that they really understand that they have that leverage ability in this day and age, if you were to start off with kind of day one you know people don’t really understand your journey quite yet they they know that you’ve done a lot you’ve worked with a lot of people but if you were starting over from day one what would be those starting foundation movements?

Dave: Well, there’s two types of marketing when it comes to book marketing right, the first is you find out what readers want and you write that book. The phrase has been coined to say ‘write to market’ right? Amazon has a certain market that’s there, it’s a quantifiable number. There are a lot of people that are looking for this type of book and they can’t find it all right, we can go into Amazon and figure out what that is that they want that they can’t find, what is it that they’re so hungry for that they’ll buy anything that comes out, we can write those books OK! That’s a wonderful tactic especially for a new author who doesn’t have a giant following a huge e-mail list or you know mad Facebook ad skills or something like that, right? This is being discovered on the market by writing what the market wants, the other way though is kind of what I learned to you just just now which is you have the ability to find a market somewhere and bring them to the book you wrote. So, you know when I was working with Pat Flynn right the fact is the guy has I’m sure he has over one hundred thousand e-mail subscribers right, he has the ability to send one e-mail to one hundred thousand people that loved his content and can convince them to go to his book, he could write a book about just putting you know his pant legs on one leg at a time and still buy them I’m sure you would too because it’s Pat Flynn right, so but he has that ability some of my some of my buddies who are huge Facebook ads guys they can probably write just a book about you know just Facebook as in general use Facebook ads and drive sales to it. So to recap on that, it’s either finding out what the market wants and providing for that or having a skill or asset that allows you to grab the market from somewhere else and bring them to your book.

Zach: And when it comes to a tool to be able to quantify this I’m really stuck on this I know a lot of my audience are the exact same way you said ‘quantify it’ {Interject: Yes} how do you do that?

Dave: Well let me give you kind of like for those out there that want to understand a market, let me give you the kind of the free way of doing this OK. the first thing is that you need to understand what words people type in Amazon, OK! What are the words they’re using when they’re searching for the next book, if you what you think the words are don’t exist then it means that we psyching it in, so now you know OK I just need down way too much right or I just don’t know what the market wants to do this to go into Amazon and start typing in your idea and Amazon will auto suggest it’s a box that pops down and tries to fill in the blank. It’s using this to basically say hey we’ve seen a lot of people type this in before maybe that’s what you’re trying to type OK and a little super awesome hat for you guys out there highly recommend that if you do that, use Chrome In Cognito mode OK, Just right click on the icon and clicking ‘cognito’. The reason being is that if you’re hacked in the Amazon or you’ve ever used Amazon before in your entire life, Amazon puts cookies on your computer and they’re tracking what you’re doing and the searchers looks will be different based off your shopping habits, so going cognito mode so it can’t use that information and it gives you the specifics, so now you can kind of see some of the phrases you don’t know which one is more popular but at least you have an idea, you can also look at the books that then show up for that idea if you click on a book scroll down and you’ll see something called an Amazon best seller rank ‘absr’ that’s a number from one to four point seven million with one being the bestselling book in all of Amazon a four point seven Billion like total trash. So there’s a number in there and it tells you how well it’s doing and we have a calculator on can opener dot com Just type in like K. D. P. calculator into Google it’ll come up number one and you can put that number in there and now you know how many books that day that book is sold so you’ve got a list of potential ideas talking about Amazon suggestion you can tell if those ideas are doing good because books are selling by using Amazon bestseller Inc and the third thing is just trying to figure out hey can I make a better book, you don’t want to go toe to toe with Guy Kawasaki or you don’t want to try to write a book about you know idea of validation and go toe to toe with Pat Flynn, right? So those are three things but for those of you who want like more quantifiable data you want to be able to see the numbers how many people type something in the Amazon, what are some better ideas, we created a software called KDP rockets and literally you just go into this thing that works in marking PC you can type in your book idea and KDP rocket will give you a giant list of keywords suggestions, it’ll tell you the average amount of money that books are making for that, number of competitors, estimated number of people that type that into Amazon, OK? And then, it also gives you a one to one hundred competition level so now you can quickly say, ‘hey this book idea has a high demand it has low competition and the people are paying money for it’ so now you have a good idea on where to start.

Zach: Awesome, So for those of you who just real quick recap, you can find that at KDP which is Kindle Direct Publishing calculator that’s going to come up in Google and the website will come right up but you know me, we’ve discussed about this so many times guys the difference between free and paid easy huge dramatic difference. Free is there for you to get the ideas to get something on paper and outline but when you’re ready to start making money in you’re actually serious about this, do get KDP rocket, I actually personally use it, I have software user, she has been rocking with some of the books that she’s released in there and we do we’ll see case studies like this so I know personally that the software I’ve been inside of it I may even make some training videos now about it and just so awesome, I couldn’t even like fathom anything without that I have seen inside that tells you you know hey ‘this is going to if you get paid to wind you do top sales you’re going to make this much is what top sellers are making. And I’ve never been able to quantify that, I’ve never seen how much money is inside Amazon books and inside Amazon Kindle it would blow your mind but once you get inside KDP rocket you do see that, don’t you?

Dave: Yeah absolutely and when we created the software we made it so that it is so intuitive and easy to use we are better testers range from fourteen years old to seventy years old from novice computer, the files are in the computer to like you know hey I know how to program this count off and we found the best way to make sure that it’s just easy to digest and just kind of roll through.

Zach: Awesome! So with that guys I’m going to be quickly putting this up here again you can get the KDP rocket here Zach dash Miller dot com (Zach-miller.com//davedas-chesson ) forward slash Dave Das dash Chesson, you can also go to kindle preorder dot com (kindlepreorder.com) look up see all of David’s awesome stuff but I don’t want to leave you just yet Dave you had so much amazing information I think we’re going to keep you for a couple more minutes I just want to ask you a couple last questions, you mind?

Dave: Yeah, no problem, absolutely.

Zach: Awesome, the one thing that I always get from everyone no matter what they start no matter what they ask me about they always want to know when I start this what’s the number one reason that probably going to fail, so I can mentally prepare myself for it.

Dave: Well, the big thing that I always find with authors is that a they just have this book inside of them and they don’t they don’t plan right so you know the process we just talked about is about how to you know get your book to shop more in Amazon right, how to figure out the market. Now here’s the thing if you use KDP rocket, use the process we just talked about and you’re finding that if there are nobody’s buying books on that or there’s no market for it or the competition is way too great that doesn’t mean you can’t write the book but what it does mean is that you cannot depend on Amazon to sell the book for you. Now you’ve got to go to that other type of marketing we talked about which is finding the market grabbing them and bringing them to your book or having that large e-mail list that you can tap into to then kick start it and get the book going on the Amazon engine right. So with that there are a lot of people that just write a book and hope that it’s going to work hope that there’s a market and they find out no there’s not, all right or they just don’t plan at all the one thing I tell authors is that the day you decide to start writing a book is the day you start marketing the book, that’s another big issue people run into. They go to hit publish and they’re like great “OK nothing’s happening, OK maybe I should do something, what do I do?” And then you’re like Ah you’ve missed it like a book launch should be like this big momentous wave a tidal wave the hit and you ride and you you know you keep bolstering it and all of a sudden it just takes off like. So to recap that, one, you know check to make sure there’s a market for it if there’s not, prepare to market your book from externally and bringing people to it and then two, make sure you start marketing the day you start writing so that you have a legitimate launch plan.

Zach: Awesome, I don’t think much more can be said, that was perfect. Everyone, Dave thank you for coming and being on and sharing your amazing information with us, so that we can be more successful on Amazon.

Zach: Hi everybody Zach Miller here again and as you know I’m always looking out for the most incredible experts that I can get my hands on that we can learn and really zap the knowledge that’s inside their brains and make it ours. Because we know that when we have enough knowledge and power of what works and what is working, then obviously implementing it is a lot easier. Just like Tony Robbins always used to say, you just find someone who’s successful, you copy what they’re doing and you’ll have similar success.

So with that being said, I have with me today the President of Spice Catalyst, he is a business planning expert, he has real teaching skills in marketing, business planning, and strategy so much that his actual degree goes into a professor. He is at Menopal Global Academy and he is just rocking it right now. I want to introduce David Fradin. How is it going David?

David: Great. Glad to be with you Zach.

Zach: Awesome so first thing I want to really get involved with is what do you do for the audience that doesn’t know about you or you know just needs to learn a little bit. What do you do, how do you help people?

David: Well the key thing for product success is a person that has the responsibilities of releasing what’s called Lisa Hewlett-Packard and that Apple is called a Product Manager. They’re the ones responsible for understanding what the customers want to do and then conveying that vision of what the product must do to the engineering team to come up with innovative ways and thought helping them get things done better and faster and with higher quality or with style. So my primary business is I teach product management and product marketing worldwide my largest client is Cisco, I’ve taught several thousand people worldwide ranging from the Bhaswati and Telecommunications Company, to the Capital One Bank, to others throughout the world.

The basis of those in-person workshops and courses, is a series of books that I’ve written. The first one was called building insanely great products which is about Amazon it’s the first of a series of three books, the next one is going to be Organizing and Managing Insanely Great Products. And then I have a series of seven books coming out from Wiley & Sons entitled The Foundations and The Successful Management of Products. The reason I called that is because most people don’t understand what a product manager does. But somebody or many people at any organization whether it’s an enterprise or a small start-up, are responsible primarily for a product’s success and I teach the things that can help or substantially increase the chances of success.

Zach: So just both physical and digital these applications can go to anybody who’s looking to build their business and be able to output products at a great efficiency right?

David: That’s correct type of product really doesn’t matter and in fact product is a tangible thing, it’s something that we could touch. A service is an intangible product something you cannot touch so this applies from hard products to soft services across the boards. All the basic principles of what it takes to have a successful product.

Zach: Cool so I just wanted the audience to understand that that is a universal all these rules are applicable, it’s not that you have to be a big start-up company or that you have to be inside the information realm, you can simply be even an author, apply these ideas I’m sure and be able to expand your business especially when it comes in to different realms of expansion, how to build products like your book covers, how to create a really great product right?

David: Exactly and I’ve had consultants like me take my courses or read my books that do the work books which gives them their business plan to implement their business. One lady who is a fashion designer and consultant, she’ll go in and take a look at a person’s closet and recommend what they should keep but not keep and they go out first to shopping trips but she needed a new way to build up a business, but like most entrepreneurs, like even most big companies, they leap right in and build the product and then they hope that they built a better mousetrap or the world would be the path to their door and there couldn’t be a bigger lie than that because if it doesn’t really do what the customer wants to do, and the customer doesn’t know about it, then it doesn’t matter how good your mouse trap is.

Zach: Right exactly. I couldn’t agree anymore and in that same line, how did you get started in your industry and you know to the point of where you are today?

David: Well I was a corporate PR at Hewlett-Packard and had always been interested in office automation and I handled Dave Packard’s from the founders personal PR when he was on the board for a few years, and I noticed that we didn’t have any word processing in the PR department. It was the only department of the company that knew how to type. So I found HP Slate with eternal word processor program, ran on a mini computer and I deployed it in the 32 person PR department and everybody loved it because the productivity went way up from the old way of using selectric typewriters and having your secretary retype and retype and retype, and that got me interested in this field of Product Management which HP developed and then has spread worldwide now building on the concept of a brand manager for Procter & Gamble dating back to 1932.

So I was able to move horizontally at product management which you can do in those days at HP, got into office systems product management then Apple recruited me to bring the market the very first hard disk drive on a personal computer was a fantastic little device it had an enormous five megabytes of storage and it only cost $3600 and nobody had any interest in it, why they would need all that space.

And so that launched my career at Apple as a product manager and though they noticed that I knew how to manage, so they asked me to take over the Apple three product line as a group product manager, and then because the company was using the wrong metrics, they tried to kill the product line with $20million worth of inventory and the president asked me what we should do about it and I said if you give me the authority commensurate with responsibility, we would sell and service this thing and he did, and we did, and we produced enough profits as a cash cow before the Boston Consulting Group even defined the concept of a cash cow to keep about a thousand to fifteen hundred Apple employees employed, including funding the development of a Macintosh.

Zach: Wow, quite enormous history to say the least.

David: That at 25 cents I still can’t get a cup of coffee at Starbucks [laughter].

Zach: All right David, so that is just so absolutely amazing, just really the power that you had and the knowledge that you were able to apply and how it made something that was basically a failure in Apple’s eyes into like you said a cash cow, a profit machine… So when it comes to business, where do you see most people as in individuals and companies kind of failing?

David: About 40% of all new products and services fail each year. According to a study I saw I think it was McKinsey or somebody else, the United States or the world spends about $1.6trillion every year in new product development and researching development. So that represents a waste of about a half a trillion to three quarters of a trillion dollars of worldwide resources that lead to product failure. And of course if the product fails, there’s no return on that investment. And I’ve narrowed down all of those failures into six T’s as to what it takes for product and service success, and they’re embodied in the name Spice Catalyst as a pneumonic spices.

So the first key is you’ve got to have a product market strategy. A strategy for your product in the market and that consists of 32 different component, most of which are skipped before the product is developed and taken to market and fail. The P stands for process, you need to have a repeatable mature process for your product management lifecycle so that you don’t keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. As one VP I was consulting with, he said they had five chronic years in the last few years, and without a process which they asked me to design for them, they had developed a culture of blame. Everybody pointed fingers at everybody else.

The ‘’I’’ is the information. Have the information available so people can make decisions in a timely manner rather than taking swag wild ass guesses or super wild ass guesses as to what the market is and where the market is, what they’re willing to pay and so forth or having available the right information at the right time. So that’s SPI, ‘’C’’ is customers and it’s more than customer centric and it’s more than just visionary customers that you could find them. Most customers can’t tell you what they want. In fact the story goes that Henry Ford once asked somebody if they wanted a car but of course in those days if you had the internet no one would have been buying keywords on car because nobody had ever heard of it before and everybody told allegedly in this urban myth, ‘’Henry no we don’t want a car, we want a faster horse.’’ It’s because he could have observed people running to meetings, riding horses as fast as they possibly can. They wanted a faster way to transport themselves and their goods from place to place. You got to ask the right question so you do that by understanding who is your customer and what they want to do and then you can roll those do’s. What do you want to do, when do you want to do, where do you want to do, why do you want to do, so forth into the jobs that they have to get done which is the type of stuff that totally already talks about; it is outcome based innovation work that says you innovate based upon the outcomes that your customers want to have. And if you do that, then it’s really easy to write the value proposition and this marketing materials and the sales pitch as to why people should buy the company or buy the product.

So that’s the ‘’C’’. The E is the employees. They have to have the competencies and the skillsets to get the job done and I’ve identified a hundred and thirty competencies that an organization must have whether it’s very very small, it’s a start-up, or as a major enterprise without which they are doomed to failure. And most organizations don’t do an evaluation of what competencies that they currently have or competencies that people have or what competencies they need to develop and lay that out in a plan over time to make sure that they have the competencies necessary for product success. And the last thing is the systems and tools. The management of products, you need to have the visibility as to where the product is in its product life cycle. Where the latest version of the sales pitch is, where is the latest version of the marketing deck is, where’s the latest version of the personas that we’re developing for or selling for and have that available to the right people at the right time.

And unfortunately most of the tools on the market today whether it’s Google Docs or Microsoft Office are sort of like handing the Carpenter a screwdriver when he really needs a hammer.

Zach: So if you were to start over today kind of from square one building your own business like a lot of entrepreneurs are in even the start-ups, what would be that first step forward? What would be that thing that you would move on?

David: It’s actually two things. One is; understand what your customer wants to do and I talked about that earlier, translate that into innovation and design, customer oriented type of design which then gives you the value proposition and then roll that into the 32 parts of a product market strategy. Now that’s going to take a little bit of time or probably take at least a man month worth of actual sitting down and doing the work and most people don’t want to do that, maybe another month or two in their order to get the interviews and the observations together for the basic data collection to validate your assumptions and your concepts about the product is. It is not getting into a room and brainstorming up a new idea because it’s totally all right points out. In order for a product to be successful, you have to satisfy 15 unmet needs and if you run the numbers because it’s a factory kind of number, he says you got to come up with nearly fifteen million ideas within which there’ll be 15 unmet needs and it’ll take you probably not if any of our lifetimes combined longer to try to get rid of the bad ideas to find the good ones and the jewels in the rough that it would be to just go out and observe and then do your market research with your interviewing and surveying and looking at the big data and so forth.

That’s precisely what Proctor and Gamble has been doing what for well over a hundred years and that’s why that company is still around and every company that’s still around today has been doing that, the companies that are no longer here are about two thirds I think or so of an original fortune 500 list, those companies are gone it’s because they did not do what I just described.

Zach: Wow that is the biggest look into why companies and people as individuals even fail. It’s all about like you said, kind of getting that customer avatar, understanding what the need is because like you said you can go out there, make 15 million new ideas, but how many of them are people actually going to find valuable to their lives intrinsically?

Well guys if you want to get David’s latest and best book, you can go to Zach-miller.com/david-fradin and again David’s website is spicecatalyst.com. All of that is on your screen. If you’re viewing this, if it’s in a podcast again one more time spicecatalyst.com you can go see all of David’s products, all of David’s courses, the books that he’s made, he has done an enormous amount. And there we have it also Building Insanely Great Products, awesome I just want to real quick zoom on up for everybody to see that, that is the newest book that David has written and if you want to learn about everything we’ve talked about in here, go check out David’s book, his courses, there is so much there for you to be virtually guaranteed to succeed.

It’s just a matter of knowing what you’re going into so that you can supply the demand that’s already there. We don’t have to make new markets guys, keep that in mind all the markets are there, they’re there for us to fish from well well overfed fish let me tell you. Thank you David for joining us, it’s been such a pleasure, I hope to talk to you very soon again.